IT’S A FAD!

One day you’re in, the next day you’re out. So goes the life of a fad.

DANCE MARATHONS

On the heels of World War I, the Roaring Twenties ushered in the freewheeling days of flappers and bobbed hair, raccoon coats and roadsters, and fads like kissing marathons, drinking marathons, rocking-chair marathons, and flagpole-sitting marathons. But the one that’s lasted in our collective memory is the dance marathon.

The first day or two of a dance marathon were relatively easy: As soon as the band struck up the first note, a couple was required only to keep moving; fancy steps weren’t necessary and would only tire them out faster. Dancers took regular breaks to rest their feet and catch a catnap. But as the dancing continued, so did the difficulty. Dancers were allowed mere minutes of rest every few hours. Sleeping while dancing was allowed; one partner would stay awake and hold the sleeper up.

Though dance marathons faded from popularity by the late 1930s, they employed thousands of people—from nurses to ticket takers to bouncers—during the Depression. Dancers who flirted with death (at least one actually died of exhaustion) became minor celebrities and made extra income by selling autographs and promotional cards. And, yes, there was the prize money to be considered: According to Guinness World Records, the longest dance marathon lasted 214 days, and the winners took home $2,000.

GOLDFISH SWALLOWING

Though most fads seem to spring up from nowhere, goldfish swallowing can be traced back to one man and one specific date: On March 3, 1939, Harvard student Lothrop Withington Jr. swallowed a live fish to win a $10 bet. Days later, not to be outdone, a college student in Pennsylvania downed three fish seasoned with salt and pepper. When a fellow classmate upped the ante to six goldfish, the gauntlet had been thrown down and the fad spread like wildfire on campuses across the country. Before the goldfish craze faded a few months later, thousands of goldfish had met gruesome ends.

PHONE BOOTH STUFFING

It started in South Africa in the mid-1950s when students there claimed to have fit 25 people in a space approximately three feet square and eight feet high. British students tried but couldn’t outdo the South Africans. American and Canadian college students had a go at it, and the craze spread across the continent, with increasingly elaborate “rules” (someone had to make or answer a call; phone booths had to be of standard size; a certain percentage of the body had to be inside to count, and so on). Lots of variations were tried, too, like stuffing people in a car or in a booth underwater. One of the shorter-lived fads of the 1950s, phone booth stuffing lost its steam by the end of the decade.

MOOD RINGS

The original mood rings, as marketed through a sensitivity training center in New York, were sold as a biofeedback aid. The ring had a stone made of quartz or glass filled with thermotropic liquid crystal that changed color in response to fluctuations in body temperature, from violet at the warmest temperature (which supposedly meant that the wearer was happy) through blue (calm), green (feeling okay), yellow (tense), and brown, gray, or black (which signaled serious agitation…or that the ring had been damaged).

The mood ring caught on like wildfire in the summer of 1975. Society columnists sang its praises and other media passed the word. Within a few days, hundreds of rings were sold for a pricey $45 each. After a few weeks, everyone who was anyone owned one: Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, Steve McQueen, and Sophia Loren— who reportedly had dozens of them shipped to her in Italy.

The liquid crystal technology was real, but mood rings weren’t all that reliable. No scientific correlation between a particular mood and a specific color was ever established. People soon realized that they didn’t need a ring to tell them how they were feeling, and by early 1976, the fad was all but over. However, as with all things old, there has been a resurgence in mood rings for new generations, often incorporating the crystal in more fanciful designs like the body of an animal.

STREAKING

The fad of streaking began on college campuses in the warm regions of California and Florida in early 1974. A streaker’s task was to dash—completely naked—from point A to point B without being arrested for indecent exposure. Most of the streakers were men, but by March of that year, mixed streaking was common.

The craze wasn’t confined to campuses, either; your average Joe and Josie began to strip and zip through restaurants, stores, or wherever the streaker could be sure of an audience. At the height of the fad, radio stations in Los Angeles broadcast “streaker alerts,” and a streaker even showed up on stage during the Academy Awards ceremony in 1974. The presenter, David Niven, had the last laugh when he commented about the inevitably of this happening and went on, “But isn’t it sad that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.” Although incidents of streaking continue to this day, the fad has yet to regain the popularity it enjoyed in the mid-1970s.

PET ROCKS

This is one of the strangest get-rich-quick schemes in history. In 1975, an out-of-work advertising executive named Gary Dahl was at a bar in Los Gatos, California, listening to his friends complain about their pets. He made a joke that “a rock doesn’t need to be fed or walked, and it’ll never die!” Inspired, the next day Dahl bought a bunch of gray stones at a building supply store (and eventually imported them from Mexico for a penny apiece), put each in a straw-lined box that was designed like a pet carrier, and wrote up a 32-page manual on the care and training of a Pet Rock. Then he started selling his rock-in-a-box for $3.95. And for whatever reason that any fad strikes a chord, hundreds of thousands of people just had to have their own Pet Rock. The fad lasted just six months, from mid-1975 to the Christmas season, but it was long enough to make Dahl a millionaire. He used the money to open his own bar in Los Gatos.

Templar Motor Co.’s 1919 roadster offered an odd option: a Kodak camera mounted on the exterior.